The Internet, in these times, offers us all types of uses, websites, services, platforms and applications. But without a doubt one of the most representative is the email that has been with us for so many decades.
Despite the enormous market penetration of more current elements such as instant messaging and its applications, email is still valid. In fact, it is estimated that the number of emails sent and received daily is in the hundreds of billions. Therefore, its importance both on a personal and professional level is beyond doubt.
In addition, the different email services and their corresponding clients do not stop offering us improvements and new functions to make their use more comfortable. A clear example and all of this can be found in the Gmail web application that Google offers us, as well as its official applications. And the same thing happens if, for example, we focus on clients as popular as Microsoft’s Outlook, which continues to grow and improve its tools.
Surely at this time many of you have several email accounts running at the same time. We can use one for personal use, another for work, another for online shopping, and much more. But in all of them we find a common factor that perhaps on many occasions we had wondered about its origin. We are referring to the @ sign also known as the at sign. Let’s see what its origin and reason for being are.
Reasons for the presence of the at sign in the email
At this point it goes without saying that this is a recurring symbol in email addresses that separates the user and server data in the email address. In this way we can clearly distinguish the name of the user’s personal account, and the mail server that provides us with the address as such.
It is a symbol that has been used since the dawn of this Internet service, mainly for two reasons. First of all, we will say that it was the engineer Raymond Tomlinson who devised the possibility of sending messages between computers in this way. That was in 1971 and in fact he was the architect of the first email in history.
Well, once we know this, in the first place the at sign began to be used because it was a symbol that was not used at all at that time in the world of technology. Thus it would become a distinctive sign of this specific courier service, as it really was. On the other hand, we must take into consideration that its original meaning in Latin is “In”, to make it clear that an address of this type means “User_Name (In)Mail_Service”.
Perhaps at the moment these two reasons do not seem too significant. But we must keep in mind that we are talking about a time when the Internet took its first steps around 50 years ago, and things were very different.
From there and in subsequent years, this is an element that has been used to identify users on different platforms and social networks, as many of you will already know firsthand. At these times it is quite common for us to find this symbol on well-known platforms such as X (Twitter), Telegram, Instagram and some more. It is usually used to identify and mention the users of these online services.
This was its origin outside of technology
But of course, as you can imagine, this symbol in question did not appear with the birth of email as such. In fact, it has been with us for centuries, although its use has not been very frequent over the years. If we go back several centuries in the past, we can say that the at sign, based on various investigations, was a character that served as a prefix and was used as a complement to words in the Middle Ages.
At that time it had different meanings, in addition to the aforementioned “En”. Likewise, it was used as “Hasta” or “a”. Years later, in the 19th century, the @ symbol was added to the typewriter keys, and continues to this day.
